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By Edgar Walters

Each Friday, the Ransom Center shares photos from throughout the week that highlight a range of activities and collection holdings. We hope you enjoy these photos that reveal some of the everyday happenings at the Center.

Author Nicholson Baker signed the authors’ door while on campus for the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies Symposia 2012-2013: The Fate of the Book. Photo by Pete Smith.Author Nicholson Baker signed the authors’ door while on campus for the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies Symposia 2012-2013: The Fate of the Book. Photo by Pete Smith.An etched reproduction of artist Tom Lea’s 1953 portrait of J. Frank Dobie in the Ransom Center’s south atria. Photo by Pete Smith.

By Alicia Dietrich

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Materials related to David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King (April 2011) are now open for research at the Ransom Center. The materials related to The Pale King were acquired as part of the Wallace (1962–2008) archive in 2010 but were retained by publisher Little, Brown and Co. until after the book’s publication and the subsequent publication of the paperback edition.

The Pale King materials fill six boxes and include handwritten and typescript drafts, outlines, characters lists, research materials, and a set of notebooks containing reading notes, names, snippets of dialog, definitions, quotations, and clippings.

The materials have been organized according to a spreadsheet developed by Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch. Pietsch, then-executive vice president and publisher of Little, Brown and Co., spent months reading through and organizing the material and found what he called “an astonishingly full novel, created with the superabundant originality and humor that were uniquely David’s.”

In conjunction with the publication of The Pale King, the Ransom Center partnered with publisher Little, Brown and Co. to offer an online preview of materials from the archive in April 2011.

By Alison Clemens

Alison Clemens is a graduate student in the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin. She processed the Daniel Stern papers as part of her capstone project for her program, and she shares her experiences working in the collection, which is now open for research.

The Harry Ransom Center acquired the papers of Daniel Stern (1928–2007), novelist and short story writer, in 2009. In doing so, the Center gained an illuminating piece of New York and American literary culture. The collection is filled with Stern’s numerous manuscripts, material related to his careers in writing, advertising, media, and academia, and correspondence with major literary figures, including Bernard Malamud and Anaïs Nin. The material provides a fascinating glimpse of how Stern produced stories as a working writer.

Born in New York City, Stern was raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and in the Bronx. He displayed considerable musical talent from an early age. He attended The High School of Art and Music and, upon graduation, played the cello with the Indianapolis Symphony and with Charlie Parker’s band. Stern disliked life in Indianapolis and returned to New York, where he took courses in creative writing and wrote jingles and copy for McCann Erickson advertising agency. Stern rose through the ranks and eventually began working in television at Warner Brothers, where he served on the board of directors in the 1970s.

Throughout Stern’s corporate employment in the 1960s and 1970s, he continued to work on his writing and published numerous novels. The Suicide Academy (1968), to which Anaïs Nin dedicated an essay in her collection InFavor of the Sensitive Man, was popularly successful. In the 1970s, however, Stern would experience two major shifts. First, he left Warner Brothers and moved to the promotions department of CBS in 1979. During this time, he also began writing short stories and sending them to literary reviews, including to Joyce Carol Oates at her magazine Ontario Review. After achieving success as a short story writer, Stern left CBS in 1986 and served as humanities director of the 92nd Street Y until 1988. He assumed teaching positions, including at Harvard and Wesleyan Universities, and joined the University of Houston as Cullen Distinguished Professor of English in 1992.

Stern’s short story collections—including Twice Told Tales and Twice Upon a Time—revisit, revise, and reinterpret literary classics by other authors. Malamud described Stern’s prose as filled with “poetry, inventiveness, verve of style, wisdom in paradox, the argument, [and] wit and comedy.” Stern’s creative process and output is well documented in the papers at the Ransom Center, as the collection contains drafts, correspondence pertaining to specific works, and even unpublished material.

In this letter, Joyce Carol Oates advises Stern on strategies to leave media and advertising work and begin his professorial career. Stern and Oates began and maintained an amiable, professional relationship, and when he began writing short stories in the 1970s, he sent his work to her for publication in her Ontario Review.

Anaïs Nin was a consistent supporter of Stern and his work. She wrote this letter to provide Stern with promotional material for his books, and her manuscript note at the top of the page implores him to use her supplied praise however he sees fit.

By Edgar Walters

Each Friday, the Ransom Center shares photos from throughout the week that highlight a range of activities and collection holdings. We hope you enjoy these photos that reveal some of the everyday happenings at the Center.

Norman Bel Geddes's Motor Car No. 9, with and without tail fin, in the exhibition 'I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America.' Photo by Pete Smith.“FutureLand” guests bring their vision of the future to life with Toy Joy’s interactive "City of the Future” at the opening event. Photo by Hector Lopez.“FutureLand” attendees in the Norman Bel Geddes-inspired photo booth, featuring Motor Car No. 9. Photo by Tirzah Johnson.

By Ady Wetegrove

Perhaps best known as the innovative designer of the Futurama exhibition in the General Motors pavilion at the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair, Norman Bel Geddes was also a noted theater designer, fabricating costumes, sets, lighting, and theaters.

After beginning his career in Los Angeles, Bel Geddes moved to New York City in 1917 where his creative ambitions manifested in producing dynamic theater experiences. Using principles of the European New Stagecraft movement, Bel Geddes brought German director Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle to the American stage. The New Stagecraft movement, which divorced theater from the structures of bourgeois realism, aligned with Bel Geddes’s vision of simplified details and abstract settings and costumes.

Bel Geddes’s work on the 1924 production of The Miracle reveals his talents as a theatrical polymath. The play, a medieval legend about a nun, relied on Bel Geddes’s mechanized scenery and single switchboard. The technical modifications allowed a single electrician to control the focus, direction, and color of the lighting. Audience members sat on pews to watch the play, as Bel Geddes transformed the interior of the theater into a Gothic cathedral, complete with light trickling through stained glass windows and incense wafting through the air. The Miracle fused theater and architecture, creating a participatory environment thatimmersed audience members in the drama thatsurrounded them.

Highlighted here is a series of four costume designs for The Miracle, including “Oriental Gentleman,” “Chief Gypsy or Jester,” “Noble Gentleman,” and “Gypsy Woman.” The watercolors showcase Bel Geddes’s dexterity as an artist.

The innovations of Bel Geddes’s early theatrical career inform his later work as an industrial designer. Indeed, the same mechanical track system used to move scenery in The Miracle also guided model cars along the highway system of Futurama.

By Alicia Dietrich

Cover of "San Miguel" by T. C. Boyle.

Novelist and short story writer T. C. Boyle, whose archive resides at the Ransom Center, has a new novel out today.

San Miguel (Viking, 2012) is a historical novel about three women’s lives on a windswept island off the California coast. Boyle is the author of 23 books of fiction, and his short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and The New Yorker.

By Jennifer Tisdale

Basketball, which began as a game invented to occupy young, energetic boys within the confines of a gymnasium on rainy days, has come to be one of the most popular sports in American culture.

Basketball: Power in Play, a display of sports photographs from the Harry Ransom Center’s New York Journal-American collection, captures some of the key components of the game from the 1940s through the 1960s.

From September 18 through December 9, 2012, visitors will be able to view images depicting various perspectives on the game such as training and technique, women in basketball, wheelchair basketball, the Harlem Globetrotters, and images of incredible shots and blunders.

The 32 black-and-white photographs in the exhibition come from the New York Journal-American, which was published from 1937 to 1968. Soon after the newspaper’s demise, the Ransom Center gained ownership of the paper’s approximately two million prints and one million negatives. Many of the photographs in the display show original crop and edit marks used in the course of publication.

Geared toward sports enthusiasts, the rich history and engaging narratives embodied in the photo captions will be sure to entertain and amuse.

The display is one of several exhibitions and events across The University of Texas at Austin campus this fall capturing the spirit and history of basketball from its beginnings in a Massachusetts YMCA to the modern NBA.

Courtesy of Suzanne Deal Booth and David G. Booth, the University’s Blanton Museum of Art will be presenting James Naismith’s “Original Rules of Basket Ball,” the 1891 document that outlines the 13 original rules of the game. The rules will be exhibited alongside the works of contemporary artist Paul Pfeiffer in The Rules of Basketball: Works by Paul Pfeiffer and James Naismith’s Original Rules of Basket Ball, running through January 13, 2013.